The Handyman

by Bentley Little

  George thought for a moment. “I had the feeling Frank had learned something over there in Vietnam. Not just seen something—every soldier sees things he wishes he could forget; I can attest to that—”

  Betsy nodded somberly.

  “But Frank…it was like he’d somehow learned some sort of secret, and it…changed him. He never said anything like this, mind you, this is just my opinion, but after the war, I always got the feeling that Frank knew something he wasn’t saying, something he couldn’t tell anyone, and it made him a little bit…off.”

  We were there for awhile longer, Dad and Mom trying to find out more about Frank and where he might have gone, and though we didn’t learn much, the overall impression I had was that George and Betsy were relieved Frank had disappeared, and, more than anything else, that odd observation stuck with me.

  We didn’t ask them why they had lied about living in the Valley.

  Before heading back to California in the morning, we stayed overnight in our bare-bones house. Dad made one last stop at the sheriff’s office on our way out, got a copy of the incident report for insurance purposes, and the detective assigned to the case promised he’d call and let us know if there were any developments.

  There were none.

  Over the next few months, Dad called the Randall sheriff’s department at least once a week, trying to “light a fire under them,” as he said, but the news he received was always the same: nothing. No one had seen Frank, our stolen furniture had not turned up anywhere, and it was highly unlikely that the case would ever be closed.

  We returned to Randall for Easter vacation. We’d spent several weekends scouring thrift stores for replacement furnishings, and a U-Haul trailer once again accompanied us to Arizona, filled with what we’d found.

  “This house smells weird,” Billy said, sniffing the air as soon as we walked in.

  He was right, it did, but Mom just told us to open the doors and windows and let in some air. The minute she walked into her bedroom, though, she rushed back out, gagging. “It’s in there!” she managed to croak, and then hurried into the bathroom where we could hear her throwing up into the toilet.

  Something like this, Billy and I had to experience for ourselves. Holding our noses, we walked through the kitchen and down the short hall to my parents’ room. The stench was powerful enough to break through the barrier of our plugged noses, and we didn’t get any farther than the doorway before we dashed back out through the front of the house and stood breathing the fresh air on the deck.

  “There’s something dead in there,” Dad announced after investigating for himself. His stomach wasn’t as delicate as ours, and he hadn’t run away like the rest of us.

  “What do you think it is?” Mom asked from the kitchen, still holding a hand over her nose.

  “Hard to tell. Rat, maybe. Mouse. Raccoon. Whatever it is, I’ll find it.”

  But twenty minutes later, having moved almost everything except the bed and dresser into the hall, with clothes from the closet piled atop the bed, there was still no sign of what could be causing the stench. “It must be under the house,” Dad reasoned. He got a flashlight from the junk drawer in the kitchen, and we followed him outside, where he opened up the small trapdoor that led to the crawlspace under the A-frame. The terrible smell wafted out through the opening but was not as strong as in the bedroom. Poking his head in, Dad shined the light around, then immediately jumped back. “Jesus!”

  Billy and I pressed forward, trying to see in. “What is it? What is it?”

  He pushed us back. “Call the sheriff,” he told Mom, his face white. “Now.”

  “What is it?” Billy demanded.

  “Dead dogs,” he said.

  Mom hurried back inside to call the sheriff, and we could hear her running footsteps on the floor of the house. Dad shone the light into the crawlspace again, and this time we saw what he was talking about. Dead dogs, four or five of them at least, with a big German Shepherd lying on top, were piled in the dirt directly below my parents’ bedroom near the rear of the house. It was a shocking and inexplicable sight. The eyes of two beagles whose heads lolled in our direction glowed silver with the reflected illumination of the flashlight. One of the animals was partially white, and on its fur we could see dark clumps of dried blood. The only sounds were our heavy breathing and the buzzing of seemingly hundreds of flies.

  I couldn’t help myself. I threw up. I managed to jerk my head to the right before it happened, but it was still too close for comfort, and both Dad and Billy jumped back with expressions of disgust. I went over to the hose and turned on the faucet, washing off my face and hands.

  Mom came back. “They’re on their way.” She glanced at the square black opening under the house. “Who do you think could’ve—”

  Dad looked at her. “Frank.”

  I could see that.

  I imagined him in the middle of the night, skulking through the forest, between trees and bushes, going from house to house, looking for dogs that were tied up in their owners’ yards, then killing the animals and carrying them over his shoulder back to our place. I shivered. Just the thought of it freaked me out.

  How had he killed them? I wondered. Poison, probably. He couldn’t have shot them because someone would have heard.

  Why our house, though? We were letting him stay there. We were nice to him.

  None of it made any sense.

  The deputies who accompanied the sheriff were the same ones who’d shown up last time, and it made me wonder how big the Randall sheriff’s department was. It was probably closer to Mayberry than Anaheim, I thought, and despite the bizarre, horrific nature of this crime, I doubted they’d be any more successful in finding Frank than they had been up to now.

  Mom took me and Billy away from the crawlspace opening and out to the front of the house while Dad explained what we’d found. From Frank’s old place across the street, three kids and a woman carrying a baby came walking toward us. The new owners. Their last name was Goodwin, and, as it turned out, the dad, who was at work, was a mining engineer. He’d been transferred here from Clifton by his company, which was reopening a copper mine in the nearby foothills that had been played out in the 1950s, but which today’s extraction technology had made once again viable. The eldest boy was a teenager and quite a bit older than me, but the younger one, Mark, was twelve, about my age. The oldest girl, Janine, was a year younger than Billy, and the littlest was a baby.

  Mrs. Goodwin and the kids had walked across the street because they were curious about the two sheriff’s cars in front of our house. Mrs. Goodwin seemed a little concerned, maybe thinking we were the type of people who were always getting in trouble with the law. But Mom explained what had happened, that we had smelled something horrible and had discovered a rotting pile of dead dogs that Frank had left under our house.

  “Frank?” Mrs. Goodwin said incredulously. “The Frank who sold us this house?”

  Mom nodded.

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Oh, believe it,” Mom said, and proceeded to tell her about our stolen furniture and the garage sale, and our discovery that Frank was infamous around town for not completing construction jobs and not paying back money he owed.

  Dad and the deputies walked out from around the side of the house. One of the officers used the radio in his car to call the office, while the other one wrote something down on a clipboard as he spoke to the sheriff. Dad approached us. “They said they’d gotten reports of five missing dogs in this area of town over the past three months. I think that’s them.”

  “So Frank killed them?” Mrs. Goodwin said. “And hid the bodies under your house?”

  “Looks that way,” Dad said.

  “Jesus,” Mrs. Goodwin breathed. “What a sicko.”

  “Oh, this is Melanie Goodwin,” Mom said, making introductions. “And this is my husband, An
dy.”

  The three of them talked while we kids tried to casually make our way over to the side of the house. We were just starting to get to know the Goodwins, so even though Billy and I had no desire to see those dogs again, we were willing to let our new neighbors check them out. The crawlspace door was still open, but when we actually got there, Janine and Mark held back with me and Billy, while Dean, the teenager, poked his head into the opening. He came back looking queasy and a lot less brave than he had a moment before.

  “Hey, you want to come over to our house?” Mark offered.

  “Sure,” I said, and the five of us headed back out to the street.

  “Where are you going?” Mom asked, always alert.

  “Over to their house,” I told her.

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Goodwin said.

  We walked across the street and tramped over the gravel driveway. “How long have you guys been here?” I asked Mark.

  “About two months. Two long months.”

  I smiled.

  “You know,” Mark told me as we approached the front door, “I think our house is haunted.”

  “Dill weed,” Dean said scornfully, pushing past us into the house and “accidentally” hitting Mark’s head as he passed by.

  I shivered, thinking of Irene. Looking up at the second floor windows, I recalled my nightmare where the front of the house had turned into her face and she had swallowed my brother.

  Janine walked inside, followed by Billy and Mark. I entered last. Dean had already plopped himself down on a couch in the living room and turned on the TV. Janine was introducing Billy to their new kitten, who was running crazily around the dining area, chasing imaginary playmates between the legs of the table and chairs.

  “Let’s check out my room,” Mark said. “It’s upstairs.”

  None of us had ever been on the second floor of Frank’s house. While the downstairs looked different with the addition of the Goodwins’ furnishings, there hung about it the same off-putting, off-kilter atmosphere that I remembered. It was not a comfortable home, and I felt even more uneasy walking up the steps to the second floor. Frank had hidden the stairway in what looked like a closet next to the kitchen, and the narrow passageway was darker and steeper than it should have been.

  At the top, the open landing offered access to two bedrooms and a bathroom. Mark headed straight into the closest bedroom, but I paused for a moment, struck by something that seemed familiar, something I could not quite put my finger on—

  The walls.

  “That’s our paneling!” I said.

  Mark turned around. “What?”

  I pointed to the walls. “I recognize it from the model home. That was supposed to be our paneling. Frank stole it.”

  I ran downstairs to get my parents. Dad was again talking to the sheriff, but Mom and Mrs. Goodwin came along with me, and I showed them the paneling on the second floor.

  “That bastard,” Mom said under her breath. I could not remember ever hearing her swear before.

  Mrs. Goodwin looked nervous. “We didn’t know anything about this…”

  Mom waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry. It’s not your fault. And we don’t need it anymore anyway. But just the thought that Frank would steal from the house that we hired him to build...” She shook her head. “Every day, it’s something else. I just wonder what we’re going to find out next.”

  What we found out next happened the day before our vacation ended.

  The Goodwins were good people. Back in California, we barely knew our neighbors. My friends and Billy’s friends were kids from school, scattered all over the neighborhood, and my parents’ friends were mostly people from work. The Harshbargers, the old couple to the right of us, we barely saw, and the Jorgensons, to the left, we didn’t really like and mostly ignored. But from day one, it was like we’d known the Goodwins forever. They weren’t just our neighbors; they were our friends. The dads got along, the moms got along, and we kids played together nearly every day, except Dean, who was too old for us, and the baby, who was too young.

  Mark and Dean shared one of the upstairs bedrooms, while Janine, being a girl, got her own. But Dean had apparently been complaining since before they’d moved to Randall that he needed his own room and was too old to be bunking with his little brother. Frank’s house had a basement—which I hadn’t known about—and Dean was pushing to make the basement into his own room. Kind of like Greg’s cool attic pad on The Brady Bunch, I imagined. The basement needed work if it was ever going to be anything other than storage space, and Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin told Dean that if he cleared it out, cleaned it up and painted it, he could have it. So he spent almost that entire week trying to get his new bedroom in shape. One day, he even gave me and Mark a dollar each to help him move a half cord of firewood from the basement to a spot outside under the rear deck.

  It was Saturday, the day before we were supposed to head home.

  We were awakened by screams from across the street.

  Morning in Randall was always quiet, the forest silent save for birdsong, wind and the occasional far off muffled whooshing of cars from the highway. So the screams of Mrs. Goodwin sounded even louder and more shocking than they would have ordinarily. It wasn’t a case of us wondering what was causing the noise; we knew exactly what it was. In fact, I thought for a second that Mr. Goodwin had gone crazy and was slaughtering his family.

  Dad was up and out the door before the rest of us had even thrown off our covers, and by the time Mom, Billy and I had dashed across the street in our slippers and pajamas, he was already inside the Goodwins’ house. The front door was open but the screen door was closed and, unsure if we should walk in uninvited, Mom knocked loudly. “Melanie?” she called. I could hear the fear in her voice.

  Mark opened the screen, his mom right behind him. Both of them looked sick.

  “What is it?” Mom asked. “What happened?”

  “There’s a skeleton in the basement!” Mark blurted out.

  Mrs. Goodwin was nodding. “Dean got up early to work on his room before breakfast and replace some rotted boards, only behind the boards was a body.”

  “A skeleton!”

  “A skeleton,” she agreed, her voice just this side of panic.

  “A kid!”

  “It looks like a child,” she confirmed.

  I wanted to go down there and see, but Mom was holding tight to both my hand and Billy’s. “Did you call the sheriff?”

  “They’re supposed to be on their way.”

  I looked at my mom, and I knew exactly what she was thinking, because I was thinking it, too.

  Frank.

  Mrs. Goodwin went to get the baby out of her crib. Dean, Dad and Mr. Goodwin came up from the basement, and we all stood outside on the porch, most of us in our pajamas, waiting for the sheriff to come. I didn’t get to see the skeleton, but the descriptions being bandied about painted a vivid picture for me. Mr. Goodwin estimated the boy’s age at about three. Mark said the body was crouched or sitting down, so it could fit into the tiny space dug into the dirt behind the wall. Dean said the skull still had some skin on it. Rotted blackened skin. He was trying to come off as tough, but he wasn’t pulling it off, and his cracking voice was a mixture of sorrow, sadness, fear, curiosity and confusion.

  “I wonder how long he’s been there,” a subdued Billy wondered.

  “We don’t know,” Dad told him. “The medical examiner will have to figure that out.”

  Mom invited the rest of the Goodwins over for breakfast, while Dean and the dads stayed to wait for the sheriff. The moms went into the kitchen, and I turned on the TV so everyone else could watch cartoons while I went upstairs and changed into my clothes. Even with the light on and the morning sun streaming through the window, the loft seemed darker than it should have, and I thought about Frank’s staring problem and the d
ead dogs under the house and the skeleton in the basement across the street, and I quickly took off my PJs, pulled on pants and a t-shirt, and ran back downstairs.

  The sheriff and a deputy arrived in the same car moments later, and a few minutes after that an ambulance and fire engine pulled up. They were all still there a half hour later when we finished breakfast. A reporter from the newspaper was taking pictures. This was obviously a big event in Randall—it would have been a big event back in Anaheim, too—and as soon as Mark and I finished eating, we headed across the street. I didn’t bother to ask Mom if I could go, because I knew she’d say no. The two of us just took off, sneaking between the ambulance and fire truck in the middle of the street and hanging around the periphery of the crowd gathered in front of the Goodwins’ door, where Dad, Dean and Mr. Goodwin were talking with a fireman, the sheriff and his deputy.

  No one seemed to know who the boy was. Did Frank and Irene have a secret son? A retarded or deformed kid they kept locked in the basement? If so, had he died accidentally or had they killed him? Maybe Frank had kidnapped a kid from another town or state, tortured him in the basement, then hid his body in the wall after he died. None of the options were good, and the onlookers grew silent as a paramedic walked past them into the house carrying an empty white zippered bag. I assumed they were getting ready to bring out the boy’s skeleton.

  “Can’t you find Frank and arrest him?” Dad asked the sheriff. “Jesus Christ, what does he have to do, kill someone in front of you before you go after him?”

  “We are after him,” the deputy said defensively. “We’re not just sitting around twiddling our thumbs. And we’ve alerted a lot of other police and sheriff’s departments, too.”

  “Don’t worry,” the sheriff said calmly. “We’ll get him.”

  “What about his in-laws? George and Betsy? Maybe they know something about this.”

  The sheriff rubbed the back of his neck. “Funny thing about that…”

  But it wasn’t funny. It turned out that the trailer had burned down, and nothing was left but blackened earth. One of the firemen said it had happened about a month ago. Propane explosion, he explained, started by a leak near the water heater.